Cushing Prize 2015 Winner

Cushing Memorial Prize for 2015

Eleanor Knox
King's College, London

The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, along with the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame and the Advisory Committee of the James T. Cushing Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Physics are pleased to announce the award of the Cushing Prize for 2015 to Dr. Eleanor Knox, Lecturer in Philosophy in the Philosophy Department, King's College London, for her paper, “Newtonian Spacetime Structure in Light of the Equivalence Principle,” published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2014). The Cushing Prize carries a $2000 award plus an invitation to deliver a lecture as part of the History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium at the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Knox was nominated by Alastair Wilson of the University of Birmingham. Dr. Wilson writes: “In the paper, Dr Knox appeals to the Equivalence Principle of General Relativity to argue that Newtonian mechanics is most naturally interpreted geometrically, so that the gravitational field is part of the spacetime structure rather than a force distinct from spacetime. She also makes significant contributions to our understanding of the relation between the resulting geometrized Newtonian gravitation theory and the orthodox non-geometrized theory.”

Dr. Knox received her D.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford University (2009), where she was supervised by David Wallace and Harvey Brown. She then was Chandaria Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy of the School for Advanced Study at the University of London (2009-2011). Following that, she received the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at King’s College London (2011-2014).